(1) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for manufacturing food, more particularly for manufacturing cookies, and even more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to a cookie manufacturing apparatus with a modular extruder capable of depositing extruded product at a speed substantially equal to the speed of a transport mechanism.
(2) History of the Related Art
Systems for the production of cookies have been common in the cookie industry since the early twentieth century. Historically, however, cookie production was a mostly manual procedure. Individuals manually procured and extruded dough into a defined shape, and manually prepared the extruded materials for production. As is the case with most manual tasks, this procedure was slow, imprecise, and inefficient. With the advent of cookie machinery, materials may now be extruded automatically and deposited from the machine in a consistent and repetitive manner.
Modern cookie machinery, however, has created new issues of concern. The modern cookie marketplace demands quantity, economical prices, and variety. For cookie making machines, these objectives translate into the manufacturing goals of versatility and speed. In cookie machinery known in the art, however, extruders are limited to an attached input feed system. If, for example, one production task involves extruding dough and another involves extruding aerated creams such as whipped cream, two different cookie making machines are usually utilized. Further, while some machines are somewhat adaptable to the speed of a conveyor belt or other transport mechanism, they involve moving a complete extruder, with all of its cables and tubes, making maintenance frequent, costly, and problematic.